Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun

Now most merchants have to work with two companies, visa and mastercard. Want to accept russian MIR cards? Well, in some countries you're not allowed to, and in some, you must, since visa and mastercard don't work there. Now if you add a european company to the mix... whill their cards get accepted in south africa? What about in eg turkey? China? Will whatever indian alternative is get accepted in france?

Currently, with a visa and mastercard, except for maybe russia and iran, you're pretty sure it'll get accepted at least somewhere in any urban area you visit, so you won't be hungry and have somewhere to sleep. If my bank replaces my mastercard with the EU alternative, I won't be that confident about that for quite a few years.

On the other hand, cash is still the king of everything everywhere... somehow some politicians are trying to get rid of that for some reason.

no it isn't

for bank to bank payment your statement might be true

but this isn't true for EC card payment and most online payment

_all_ EC cards either use the Visa Payment network and secure modules or the Mastercard one (but by now it's mostly Visa in most places). Sure they have your banks local branding but it's Visa anyway.

This also applies to payment terminal, most (not all) go through the Visa payment network to process payments.

And even in the same country a lot of online payment either goes through credit cards (again mostly Visa in EU) or PayPal. This isn't technically needed at all but due to fragmentation whatever alternative you want to use is just sometimes available.

Which is where Wero comes in:

- try to reduce fragmentation by making it a cooperation across many banks (of which most had their own failed PayPal alternative)

- onboard people on (local) online banking and private Phone2Phone payment (e.g. bill sharing)

- then (now) expand to pushing some payment terminal providers to support it with Phone based payment. There are multiple initiatives for it.

The later part is possible due to 3 reasons:

- payment apps on phone bypassing secure module monopoly nonsense related to EC/Credit cards and visa

- a lot of the in-person checkout systems of small businesses are now a tablet + separate cash register + EC terminal. This means that even if the EC terminal doesn't support Wero the payment system can still do so through their tablet.

- Also I think some of the wider used payment terminal in large EU specific chains can get Wero support with a software update.

Still it's by far not a perfect situation:

- still too much fragmentation/to little adoption by banks

- "old" payment terminals and (physical) checkout systems which are bound to Visa and can't easily be updated

So there most likely won't be a hard break anytime soon, and your EC card will likely continue using Visa secure module and network for a very very long time.

But having a technical working alternative which can slowly start eating market share is already a huge step forward.

Of course, what could go wrong!!

Unbelievable, a chance to make a whole new standard, new system, new everything, but yet we still have the need to tie it to ancient protocols, only to find later it’s broken by design and we start adding all sort of duct tape solutions to make it “secure”..

This is either a completely and entirely stupid move by some boomers living in the 80s, or maybe, it’s intentional to enforce something insecure like a phone number/GSM as a “national ID” to easily track citizens and force them to have a phone number linked to their real life, and I think it’s the second one, the same reason why many “secure” chatting apps still require a phone number.